FARMING MATTERS: Recording a little bit of social history

Heather Jan Brunt

Published:07:00Saturday 10 February 2018

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I’ve written before about the short video films I make about life down on our farm.

Recently I added two more to the series. The footage was actually shot well over a year ago! But life is busy and this has been the first opportunity I have had to go through the footage, chose appropriate music and take it to my dear friend Richard for editing.

The first video shows a field of hay being cut on a nice warm day, but has the added element of a hot air balloon landing on the cut hay. Although this might not have been ideal for the hay, it certainly made for an interesting, additional element in the video. And the three guys who were involved with the balloon were happy for me to film them wrapping the balloon up and removing it, the basket and the cylinders to the recovery vehicle.

The second video was shot on a colourful autumn day in the farmhouse garden when chainsaw work was taking place to cut down ivy from the dovecote and to saw up logs.

The colours in this video are particularly stunning, not only do we have the exceptional golden and brown colours of the autumn leaves rustling all over the ground, but the machinery used is bright and because the sun was shining it all makes for quite a stunning visual piece.

Our farm cat has a starring role in both videos as she is incredibly sociable and gets involved in most things that take place on the farm.

The two new videos are on YouTube, along with all the others we have made over the years. There are three series now and some of the individual videos have attracted millions of views, which is rather satisfying. The most popular ones involve the cows and calves, but we also have videos with sheep, lambs, arable work and our little farm shop.

We’re not trying to lecture or proselytize, the only aim is to provide a snippet of social history showing some of the things that happen on a typical English family farm, and to record a little bit of it for future generations to see.